While gathering my thoughts for part two of Magic Money Tree I was alerted by Dave Hansell to an UnHerd post of October 20. Now as Richard Murphy recently pointed out, the British Labour Party is fully committed – as is the least outlandish contender for Tory leader and prime minister – to more of the ‘austerity’ which has already devastated the lives of millions of Brits.
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As WSWS put it:
Truss’s replacement will be expected to restore confidence in the UK economy by savaging the working class. And if the Tories cannot fix their mess to the satisfaction of the financial oligarchy, the Labour Party promises to step in …
Steel city reader bevin goes further:
The natural political division in the UK right now is between Blairism and Socialism. Truss is not the first Tory PM to dissolve on contact, she is the fourth in less than a decade. The Tory ‘brand’ is no longer fit for purpose – Blairism serves the ruling class far better. And when it is opposed by Toryism it is unbeatable because the only alternative is a clumsier version of itself.
Social democratic parties aspiring to govern on behalf of a ruling class must satisfy that class – which ultimately controls opinion manufacture – that they can be trusted with The Economy. For nigh on half a century this has meant being fully onboard with neoliberal economics – and since 2008 with ‘austerity’ – which enrich the few while delivering poverty and insecurity to the many.
Even the mild socialist reforms offered by Labour under Corbyn and McDonnell were too much. After various attempts – IRA-gate, Shoot-to-kill-gate, Hamas-gate, Virgin-Train-gate and Crap-dresser-gate – had fallen short, the Labour right struck gold with the antisemitism charge. Not only was a leader detested by Britain’s elite, and the powerful Israeli lobby, defenestrated. The Party as a whole was steered away from economics and class, onto the safer terrain of identity politics …
.. and once more redeemed and renewed in the City and on Threadneedle Street.
Never mind that issues like race and gender can never be fully understood without the context of class rule. Never mind that as Caitlin Johnstone once put it:
In just 200 years we’ve progressed from expecting our leaders to slaughter brown-skinned peoples while saying racist things, to expecting our leaders to slaughter brown-skinned peoples while condemning racism.
Never mind either that Party membership plummeted after Corbyn’s removal. As for identity politics being a road to absurdity, confusion and terrible law-making; that, for this former head of the Crown Prosecution Service, is nothing to lose sleep over.
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What Keir Starmer told Pink News is a sign of things to come
The Labour leader’s remarks revealed how little he has learned
Sir Keir Starmer strikes again. At the very moment when the government is falling apart, and thousands of women desperately want to vote Labour, he has reminded us that we can’t trust him or his party. It’s not just that he made an appearance last night at an awards ceremony organised by Pink News, an organ despised by many feminists for its relentless promotion of misogynist gender ideology. That was bad enough, but Starmer also took the opportunity to make a series of wild promises to the adoring audience, including one on ‘hate crime’ that constitutes a direct threat to free expression.
Hate crime legislation is already a problem, allowing individuals to make complaints to the police about things that aren’t even crimes — being ‘misgendered’, for instance. The fastest-growing area of complaints is ‘transgender identity’, which rose by 56% in the year to March 2022. There is ample reason to worry about how the existing law is being used but Starmer wants to double down, saying “it’s time for tougher hate crime laws so every LGBT+ crime is treated as an aggravated offence.” It went down a storm with his audience, but raises the prospect of law-abiding people facing an aggravated sentence for a social media post that uses the ‘wrong’ pronouns.
Starmer made other baleful commitments at the awards. He no longer talks about self-ID because we know exactly what that means — stripping away safeguards, weak as they are, that make it harder for predatory men to claim to be women. Now the Labour frontbench talks about ‘modernising’ the Gender Recognition Act, which sounds like a minor technical change. Those of us who recall what Starmer said in 2021, when he committed Labour to reforming the GRA “to include self-identification for trans people”, don’t believe it for a moment. Last night he used the new formula without spelling out what it means, but it looks as though Labour intends to allow individuals to get a gender recognition certificate without having a medical diagnosis of dysphoria.
At the same time, Starmer threw a sop to women, saying he would “uphold the Equality Act,” including its provision for single-sex spaces. Though some Labour supporters have welcomed this part of his speech, they’re clutching at straws. You can’t uphold the right to single-sex spaces while also allowing any sexual predator to acquire a legal document that says he must be treated as a woman, even though he has a male body. Refuges and services that refuse access to trans women might win a case in court, but the prospect of fighting a costly legal action will make it easier to just give in.
For some time now, feminists in the Labour Party hoped that Starmer was quietly rowing back on the nonsense he’s come out with in the past, such as claiming that some women have a penis. Some even thought that ‘modernisation’ of the GRA might be dropped from the party’s manifesto. We can hope no longer. Last night, Starmer told us who he was and exactly what he intends to do. In a tragedy for Left-leaning women and the country, it is now clear that Labour has been fully captured by gender extremists. A Starmer government will look after the interests of trans activists, not women.
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The rate the economy is tanking going to prison for using the wrong pronouns will be the only way many people will be able to obtain a roof over their heads and at least one square meal a day for themselves and their family.
The small print of Starmer’s proposed legislation will be interesting to peruse. Will it legislate self-id on the basis of genuine equality or will it be selective by limiting it to gender only?
Point being that given the state of the NHS it would be useful to be able to self-id as a “Furrie’ in order to receive quicker treatment at the local vets. Though the thought of being limited to Whiskers and Pedigree Chum when visiting the local foodbank might be a disincentive?
People would be also able to escape the poverty of imposed austerity, inflation and real term wage cuts by self identifying as older than they are. Becoming instant millionaires after collecting decades worth of back pension and other benefits for the elderly – such as winter fuel allowance, free NHS/Vets prescriptions, bus passes and the like.
And just how would this work in practice?
The Men’s Supremacy Movement masquerading as a ‘progressive’ civil rights campaign which puts itself permanently at the top of an artificially manufactured hierarchy of oppression is already arguing that the term “Child Safeguarding” is a transphobic dog whistle. Will parents of young people be arrested for ‘hate crime’ when they complain of biological men taking photographs of their children in clothing store changing rooms (something which is being reported as a problem in Primark of all places).
There already exists a substantial number of cases of the police attempting to prosecute, bully and harass people for expressing the ‘wrong’ opinion. Meanwhile, the present anti-protest Bill going through Parliament will doubtless be ruthlessly used by the purity spiral crowd to prevent women from meeting to discuss their interests and concerns.
And that is in addition to people already being barred from facilities ranging from leisure centers, schools, universities etc for complaining of fully intact biological males parading naked around female changing rooms; losing their livelihoods; being cancelled from their own political conferences; and being refused services at rape crisis centers.
The latest example being this case:
https://grahamlinehan.substack.com/p/beyond-belief
In which a seriously ill biological woman – and former sex attack victim – has been refused what may turn out to be timely life saving surgery by a hospital because she has had the temerity to formally request her treatment be carried out by biological women.
In this kind of cancel culture climate which has a chilling effect on people it will be revealing to see just how many complaints, if any, were made to Channel Four about this recent broadcast:
https://grahamlinehan.substack.com/p/a-revolution-of-mediocre-men?
(‘Don’t look Ethel’)
As one twitter post observed the day after Starmer’s speech at the Pink News Awards put it:
“The country is in chaos. Ministers are having punch-ups in the Commons. The electorate is crying out for grown-ups to take charge. So what did Keir Starmer do last night? He announced he’ll make it a crime to refer to these two as ‘he’. What time’s the first flight to Mars, Elon?”
In our lifetimes the largest example of voters simply switching off and not bothering to register a vote (though some of this will be spoiled papers – it being next to impossible to find this specific data anywhere) was the 18+ million in 2001. As matters stand I can see that easily going through the 20 million barrier if we ever have another General Election. Such is the paucity of choices on offer.
As Richard Murphy observes this morning:
https://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2022/10/23/who-is-going-to-upturn-the-political-tables-and-say-people-planet-and-community-above-all-else/
With both main Westminster Party’s committed to the same failed economic, foreign, domestic and other policies just who (and how) is this going to be turned around?
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Graham Linehan has been assiduously tracking the increasingly unbelievable mutations of the “trans” matter. Speaking as an inhabitant in a rural area*, much of what he’s reporting looks to me to be trailers for an unlikely dystopian movie. Indeed, quite often I have given up halfway through an article since I feel I can honestly no longer understand what is happening.
The impression I have is of a tiny minority of people who are obsessed with the minutiae of artificially invented distinctions which are becoming increasingly incomprehensible. Meanwhile the outside world burns.
*It is not true that this area is totally unaffected. There was the teenage daughter of a work colleague who decided to adopt a non-gender specific name. And it struck me how the trans issue was a marvellous opportunity to give young people another avenue for gratifyingly pseudo-radical posturing. It’s hardly surprising that over lockdown, the number of young who experienced the “revelation” that they were transgender skyrocketed.
The attack on pronouns and the logic of sexuality is another indication of a drift towards the destruction of language itself predicted by Orwell in the appendix to 1984.
“The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible. It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought — that is, a thought diverging from the principles of Ingsoc — should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words.”
Meanwhile a comment on the Unherd article shows up a piece of confusion that is much intended:
“The view of the British public: left on economics: right on culture is so well known now it has become a cliche.
And yet no party can grasp it! The Tories commit suicide trying to lower the top rate of tax and Labour can’t distinguish between a man or a woman.
What a shower!”
“Left on economics” makes sense. But “right on culture”? The diversion of Marxist thought away from economics and towards the cultural sphere was more than an indication of the retreat of such thought. It was a manufactured self-castration.